Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie we'll take a look at how to navigate your 3D scene and 3D space with the cameras. There are a couple of tools over here and the function may be in a little counterintuitive way, they don't make sense right off the bat. Let's look at these real quickly. There's the Track YZ, the Track XY, and the Track XZ. Now these have to do with the axises of space. We see, down here in the lower left-hand corner of our Assembly Room, the X-axis, which is red, kind of, you know, runs left to right, the Y-axis sort of runs front to back, and the Z-axis, which is blue and very difficult to see, goes top to bottom. If I come here and choose the Track XZ control, keyboard shortcut E, if I use the E actually in my scene, the keyboard shortcut, I'll press that down, my mouse converts to the tool so I can see, it gives you a little visual representation of what the tool will do. This is really helpful but wait a minute. The Z-axis down here in the lower left-hand space goes up and down, but this is an XZ camera, what's going on here? If I click and drag it looks like we're zooming into our scene and if I go left to right, well, well yeah, we're going left to right. The reason for that is how the camera is oriented. We've got Camera 1 selected right here and I opened up the Motions tab of the Properties Palette to show you that this camera has been rotated. So the Z-axis actually is running straight through the camera. And you're going, what? Wait a minute. Well, let's do something here. We'll go to Insert, we'll come down here to Conical, and Insert a new Camera in our scene. You'll notice that when a camera inserts I'm going to click and drag on the blue Z-axis, the camera's pointing straight down. The reason the XZ Track Control functions is because the Z-axis actually runs right through the camera. The camera that we're using in our scene, Camera Render 1, I'm going to switch over to our Directors Camera, which I've pointed at Camera 1 so you can see what I'm talking about. I'll click on Camera 1 and we'll come down here instead to Directors Camera. I'm going to go ahead and just drag through my scene here real quick. You can see the Z-axis right here running right through the camera and then the X-axis, the red one, you can always just check the colors for the relationship, but that's where the left-right is coming from, and the Z allows you to go in and out of your scene. There's our scene and here's the Camera 1 that we looked through. I'll switch back to Camera 1 and we'll look through it that way. Correspondingly, if we wanted to look through Camera 2 all we've got to do is select Conical. We haven't named it, so it comes in with a default named Conical, and we see a bunch of gray because it's pointing at the top of that cube. I've got a mouse wheel so I'm going to zoom in and out with that on my mouse. We can see our scene now, but you can also use this Track Tool right here, X and Z, because you already know that the Z-axis runs straight through the middle of the camera, so by clicking this tool and dragging in and out I can do that, or if I press the keyboard shortcut E you see a representation of that tool. Let's switch back to our Camera 1, the Render Camera. Now when I grab any of these other tools, I use the keyboard shortcut W, or the keyboard shortcut Q, they're all conveniently located in the upper left-hand corner of your keyboard for your use. By clicking notice you can see exactly what's going on with your scene. Now this is nice for sliding the camera around left to right, going up and down, but what if I wanted to change where the camera's pointing? Well, then what we need to do is use our Dolly Controls, which are just right over here. We've got Dolly, we also have Tilt, and we have Bank. Keyboard shortcut for Dolly is D. So, I'm going to Ð you can grab the Trackball here and move it, and see it go around your scene like this, and note that the camera always rotates around the center of the scene unless an object is selected Ð very important distinction right here. If I select the Cube and now use the Dolly it's going to rotate around the cube. If I use my Track controls here real quick and move the scene over just a little bit and select this light now when I use my Dolly Control it moves around the light. So it's a great way to very specifically manage the controlling movements of your camera and the rotational movements of your camera that way. The other controls we've got available to us, say for example, the Pan, now it says keyboard shortcut D, but watch what happens. I'll roll over it now and it's keyboard shortcut actually P, so D for Dolly, P for Pan, and then B is going to be for Bank. With the Pan it allows you, just like the camera's on a tripod, so think of the Pan instead of dollying around an object if you want the camera to pan the scene then you set it up on a tripod and Tilt it. Dolly is a free-gimbling movement, Pan is a tripod movement, and finally we've got Bank Ð let me go all the way down on that, keyboard shortcut B for that by the way Ð we can go ahead and tilt your camera by clicking and dragging in your scene to give you a unique perspective. We'll be using this as we do some camera animation actually going through the scene, but we can do that automatically. Now you can see it over here. If we look in our Camera Controls here a little bit, and we start moving, you'll notice that the Bank doesn't update anything on the Motion Palette because the camera's not actually moving. It's rotating a little bit but that's different. As far as it's concerned it's the same. If we go back to D for Dolly Ð let me select an object and press D there Ð we'll get a little bit of difference as we come in and out of our scene. So there, in a nutshell, as to how to use the Track Controls, why they function the way that they do, because of the camera orientation, and then how to use the Dolly, Pan, and Bank Cameras in your scene.